The Basics of SEO Every Business Owner Should Know

The internet would be a tough place without search engines such as Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing that help us find practically anything that we need online.  

Thanks to search engines, finding a product or service that you need takes nothing more than a few keywords and looking at the first few search results. Conversely, if you are an entrepreneur running an online business, you might want to ensure that your website shows up first when users search for what you offer. This is where the concept of search engine optimization or SEO comes into play. 

What is SEO?

SEO is what you do if you want your website to place on top of the search results for specific target keywords. The optimization of your site affects its search engine ranking. 

Why Do You Need SEO?

SEO makes it easier for your audience to find your website through the search engines. 61% of marketers believe that boosting SEO and improving organic presence is their top inbound marketing goal. The more visible your website is in the search results, the more likely your audience will visit it. In turn, you get more profitable opportunities.

Key Components of SEO

While proper SEO relies on various technical factors, its foundations are built on three  four things: technical optimization, keyword optimization, content, and backlinks. 

Technical

Technical SEO is a crucial element of the process. It ensures the necessary investigatory work and implementation of enhancements to the technical parts of the website and server. Allowing the search engines to crawl and index the website and pages much more effectively.

Keywords

Keywords are words or phrases that people use to find what they need. For a website to be discovered quickly, it should strategically use a mixture of top-ranking keywords and long-tail phrases. This tells the search engine that your page has content that your audience may be looking for. 

That said, optimizing keywords is an important aspect of SEO. This involves knowing the right keywords to target and ensuring that keywords are found in the right places throughout your website. 

Content

“Content is king” is a phrase that you probably often hear when people talk about SEO in 2021. Your site’s content serves as your brand’s voice. It helps engage with your audience. Your content will show up on the search results to address their query. 

Search engines have made it a priority to consider the quality of content that shows up in their search results when ranking your website. In this case, good content should be readable, unique, and offer actual value to your audience. 

Backlinks

Backlinks are links pointing back to your web pages. Backlinks found in external websites tell the search engines that your site is credible enough that other sites link back to you. 

The SEO score you gain through backlinks depends on the site that endorses your content, the quality of the content where your link is found, and whether or not the link is do-follow — that is, one that the search engine’s crawlers are allowed to follow and index. 

Link building, or the generation of backlinks for this very purpose, is done through the following means:

• Requesting link placements in content or pages where your site is relevant
• Guest posting articles that contain a link to your site
• Creating high-quality content that other sites find good enough to reference

SEO is Essential in Modern Business

SEO provides businesses with much-needed visibility that draws in clients. Taking care of this is important if you don’t want your business to sink into online obscurity or get buried by the competition.

“All in all, great SEO doesn’t always have to be complicated. A well built and optimised site, that is easy and efficient for search engines to crawl, as well as have a fast load time, with well thought through content that engages its visitors, answers their questions and adds value, will deliver positive results. The more competitive your digital landscape, the more SEO effort you’ll require. And SEO should be a component of your marketing, not the be-all and end-all”.  

Karl Paul, Executive Chairman, Smarter Media Ltd